You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive
by Pickwick12
Summary: Character perspectives as I watch Justified for the first time, because that's what I do best. Raylan-heavy at first but will branch out to other characters. Better than it sounds, I promise.
1. The Given Name

**The Given Name**

Raylan Givens. He hasn't always been proud of his name, but it would never occur to him to change it. Some things just fit, like the hat and the sage-green t-shirt and having a name that reminds him of Harlan County, the place he'll never go again.

Except, the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. He feels more like a mouse than a man when he boards the airplane. There is no guilt in his soul, but being justified, unfortunately, doesn't exempt you from being transferred by the US Marshall Service. Suddenly, his name is a little bit too immediate, a threat rather than a reminder. He's a brave man, but he's not exempt from fear.

He hates fear. He has been overcome with dread twice in his life past the age of twelve, when he decided that no matter what Arlo did, it wasn't going to scare him. The first time was when he'd come home and found Winona gone. It had felt like one of those urban legends where someone puts you under and takes your kidney without you realizing it. Except, it felt like she'd taken his heart.

The second time, not that he'd admit it to another soul, was when he'd realized he couldn't fight Harlan and stay a Marshall. There's a reason somebody wrote a song called "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." The first time was a near-miracle. He doubted he deserved another.

And yet, somewhere between the supremacist ramblings of Boyd Crowder, the feel of Ava's lips on his, and the two-bit motel, something starts to shift. There's fire in the hole and fire in his heart. You can't dread something you're indifferent to, the way the sharpness in his gut when he thinks of Winona reminds him of the love he still harbors.

Perhaps dread portends love—love for bumpy dirt roads, moonshine that can knock your head clean off, and people who don't know how to mind their own business. Maybe there's even a little place in his heart for the vision that makes his eyes narrow every time he approaches Helen and Arlo's place—of a skinny kid named Raylan, who wanted nothing more than to be the hero in the westerns he snuck out to watch.

He hasn't ever been proud of Harlan, but somehow it still fits, like the name and the hat and the gun. Sometimes, you have to take what you're given.


	2. Better or Worse

**Better or Worse**

No one knew why he'd never tried to win Ava Crowder, no one but him, that is. It wouldn't have even been an effort, they said, because everyone knew everyone's business, and sometimes when football and baseball were out of season, the bookies took bets on which of Harlan's high school romances would go the distance.

Ava had always adored him, from the time he'd punched Bowman Crowder in the face for teasing her in seventh grade. But when the chips fell some years later, she was married to Bowman, and Raylan had given his hand to the certainly desirable but considerably less obvious Winona Hawkins.

Some of the older women, with knowing nods, said it was because Ava had been too open in her preference. And who could blame her, when Raylan had those pretty eyes and that smile that could melt butter? When asked, Raylan said it had been her age, but it hadn't been. After all, that's a problem time takes care of powerfully quickly.

When it came down to it, Ava and Winona were both a little crazy. Harlan didn't mind. It liked its women beautiful and a little bit off-center. Raylan didn't mind either. He'd always had a thing for crazy, ever since his Aunt Helen had taken him mudding at 2am when he was nine. Normal women didn't do that. He'd lost his taste for normal.

The real clue to the whole thing was what happened when the Marshalls shipped Raylan Givens back down Harlan's way, and he immediately took up with the now-widowed (to put it kindly) Ava Crowder, directly after she'd put a slug through Bowman's ribcage. The same old women, even older now, said it was fate, that things were finally happening as they'd always been meant to be.

But Raylan knew. He knew as soon as Ava brought her shotgun to dinner the night Boyd Crowder nearly killed him. He knew it even more when she refused to leave Kentucky.

The problem was, Ava Crowder had never needed him enough. It was only in those few, strange, beautiful weeks of her trial that she'd ever been remotely helpless. She had a voice that could summon men's hearts from over the mountain and a face that could stop a mine full of workers, but for one brief span of time, she'd been content to lay her head on Raylan Givens's shoulder and let him take care of her.

But it hadn't been real, a temporary aberration of a woman who was bound and determined to do it on her own. When it was over, she still wanted Raylan, but she was finished depending on him. He knew, then, that even if it hadn't been for the botching of Boyd's trial, he'd have broken up with her anyway. He couldn't exist where he wasn't needed. It was like asking a miner to dig where there was no coal.

Nobody but Raylan realized that Winona was the crazier one. The put-together court reporter with her pressed skirts and perfect hair was a mess and a half, with impulse problems so big they could fill all of Kentucky. Most people could understand why Ava had shot Bowman Crowder; there was no explaining why Winona Hawkins had decided to lift 200 grand and then give it back. But she needed him, and for Raylan Givens, to live was to be needed. Ava Crowder 's dulcet voice couldn't match the appeal when Winona haltingly uttered the phrase, "I think you're going to save me." That was all there was to it and how it had always been, how it always would be.

Ava Crowder was beautiful, but Winona—she was his to protect, for better or worse.


	3. Classics

**Classics**

Harlan County would have been surprised to know that Raylan Givens had a taste for Shakespeare. He'd been forced to read _Hamlet _in high school, and he'd liked it so much he'd moved on to the next play in his textbook, _King Lear_. That's where he'd found Edgar and Edmund—half brothers, yin and yang, one determined in the direction of good, the other equally determined in the direction of evil, but both uncompromising in their methods. He'd decided the day he read it that westerns, which he loved, weren't all that different from the Bard's works. Less guns and more swords, but that was about the only thing that separated them.

Life in Harlan always seemed a little more epic in scope than the rest of the world, even while it smothered its inhabitants with a claustrophobia borne of everything being the same as it had been for the past hundred—or two hundred—years. Boyd Crowder was a man of his county. People up in Lexington who read the accounts of his exploits probably didn't quite understand, Raylan thought. They saw his fires as the little rage of a hillbilly. But there was much, much more to it than that. Boyd might be certifiably insane, but it was insanity with a curious beauty about it, a deeply compelling curse that made him seem like a snake who did the charming instead of being charmed. Boyd was anything but small.

It wasn't until Raylan returned to Harlan that he realized his own role in the tale. Where there's an Edmund railing against fate and using his misfortunes to justify murder and rage, there must be an Edgar, whose equally white-hot rage justifies a severity that stamps out evil wherever it's found. Boyd had chosen his side, and Raylan easily chose his own. Hadn't he always suspected that life was meant to be lived in a more heightened way than the drones in Miami chose to experience it?

Raylan had never wanted to return to Harlan County, but it was his reassignment and subsequent re-acquaintance with the brilliantly twisted Boyd Crowder that finally cast him in the role he was born to play. He wasn't sure if he was part of a Shakespearean tragedy or a classic western, but did it really matter? There wasn't much difference.


End file.
